Fi Phillips, Warrior of the Weird

If you can believe it, there was a time when the Disney Channel wasn't inundated with teeny-bopper sitcoms... and among the shows that aired back around the turn of the century was this incredible, criminally forgotten gem called So Weird. (Here's the opening: www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8frXz…)

The story followed a young girl named Fi, who was fascinated by the paranormal and ran a website from her laptop where she could chat with others about encounters she'd had with the unexplained, to try and work out what the spook of the day was. She had a brother named Jack who acted as her skeptic foil, but she also had a rock star for a mother, and most of Fi's story arc took place on the road in a tour bus, as her widowed mom (Molly) was in the middle of a nationwide tour. Rounding out the cast was Ned, the bus driver and head roadie (played by Dave "Squatch" Ward, who I later found out was also the voice of Ox King and King Kai from the Ocean dub of DragonBall Z!), Irene, Ned's wife and Molly's agent, and Clu, their son (with the token surfer dude accent). But the underlying core of Fi's story was the occasional hints she got along the way that there was foul play involved in her father's death... though without a flesh-and-blood perpetrator.

Unfortunately, by the end of the second season Fi's actress, Cara DeLizia, had decided she was leaving the show, and to really pound the nail into the show's coffin, Disney used this as an excuse to impose their Executive Meddling on the show's creators, completely missing the point of the series and destroying what made it stand out from the rest of Disney Channel's lineup. They replaced Fi with a new girl named Annie, whose backstory and motivations I didn't find half as engaging as Fi's, and part of her characterization was that she was also... ugh... a gifted pop singer. Yes, this was the beginnings of what the Disney Channel would become. The show's creators have, in the years since, let slip a ton of information about what they had planned for season 3. Suffice to say, it would have been amazing and epic had they been allowed to continue on that track.

But anyway, I would definitely recommend So Weird to anyone. As you might expect, it's yet another one of those shows that Disney pretends never existed and has never released any DVDs for it, so it takes a tiny bit of searching, but it's worth it, believe me. The writers didn't talk down to their audience even though they knew most of them would be children, never pulling punches with scary material unless Disney really forced them to. There's one episode in particular ("Strange Geometry") that still successfully gives me the chills, even at my age.

But yeah, check it out! You won't regret it.

UPDATE: It's on Disney Plus!